As they continue to watch their buddy do whatever it is he’s doing, I try once more to move any part of my body.
Nothing.
I can barely lift my head, or raise a pinky.
Mr. Beard comes back, stares down at me with that wicked grin of his, hidden beneath a wild mess of facial hair. He dangles something in his hand like a yo-yo, then tosses it, where it lands right in front of my face.
Unfortunately, it’s not a yo-yo.
It’s a piece of Keyaha.
A strip of her hair and a fleshy sliver of her scalp to be exact.
Keyaha!
My love.
Everything . . .
Goes . . .
White . . .
An atomic bomb of pure madness mushrooms inside me—
“KEYAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAA!”
I scream her name out as tears burn my eyes, making it hard to look upon my enemies.
The very men who killed my love.
The stranger kneels and stares into my eyes. He smells of dead things and desecrated earth. He’s speaking to me in the evil tongue and laughing. I want to cut that tongue from his vile dog mouth, but my body betrays me. Something has cursed my limbs.
I scream at him for taking my Keyaha, but he just laughs and says in his wicked tongue, “Yo mato animales.”
I want to tear him apart, but I cannot.
“Tu comprende?” he repeatedly says in a language I have never heard before. “YO MATO ANIMALES!”
My body refuses to move. I am but prey at the mercy of these savage coyotes.
He raises up his fire stick, points it at me—
Chapter 32—Two in One
There’s a blast of light, and I jump to my feet, gasping as if I’ve just been resuscitated.
“Welcome back,” a voice says.
It takes me a moment for everything to focus.
I’m surrounded by hunters.
Along with Baxter. “You took a shorter trip than most.”
How am I back? Where was I? I touch where Baxter stabbed me. The gaping wound is still there. The flesh in and around it burns.
“Yeah,” Baxter says, “your heart isn’t working like it used to.”
I’m alive?
But how?
Wait.
I’m not alive.
I’m something else.
“We still feel pain,” he says, “but that pain is overshadowed by the venom inside us.”
I reach for the bone knife that I had stuffed in my pants. It’s gone. Along with the necklace.
“Looking for this?” Baxter asks as he puts on the necklace.
No!
He took it from me while I was . . . dead.
“Now,” Baxter’s voice drops several octaves, deepening as he says, “Nannokto . . .” then, “you may come out!”
My eyes suddenly feel like they’re on fire. This is followed by a ringing in my head. I squeeze my eyes shut, grit my teeth, and press my palms flat against the sides of my head. I feel as though my skull is trying to split itself in two. It’s as if Baxter’s words are like a concussion grenade, setting off a blast of light, blinding me to the world around me—
And as my eyes focus, I take a moment to . . .
A moment to assess my surroundings.
Assess?
What is this word—assess?
Many words are floating around in my head. The language of the strangers is woven within the dialect of my own.
I glance at my hands. Light skinned. The color of the enemy.
What is this?
Whose hands are these?
How am I here?
What happened to the men armed with their fire sticks?
What happened to Keyaha?
“Nannokto,” a familiar voice says, and I glance up, recognizing three of my Kenneh’wah brothers—Okoto, Negache, Kuma. How are they here?
They have a fair-skinned woman in their possession. She is beautiful, though not nearly as lovely as my Keyaha. Okoto tells me that they have been awakened to protect our land from the invaders—from the chek-tah.
“Nannokto?” A light-skinned man with a large belly knows my name. “Mak tah, Baxter. Jekat ala no?”
This . . . man . . . Baxter . . .
He speaks our tongue?
“Jekat ala no?” Baxter repeats his question to me as he caresses the chieftain necklace draped around his neck. It is adorned with the pulled teeth of our ancestors.
I look to my brothers, one by one, searching for an answer within their glowing eyes—eyes that flicker like torches. But instead of answers, they look at me with vacant expressions. They are not themselves. They are not the vibrant brothers I remember. Their faces hang like the dead, with skin as pale as the shells of the eggs of birds and lizards.
Is this truly our new leader—a foreigner?
As if reading my thoughts, or more likely my expression, they finally nod in affirmation.
Affirmation?
What is this word—affirmation? What are many of these words inside me? These are the words of the foreigners. And yet they are words that I understand. Words that I have never spoken, yet know with such clarity. Such understanding.
Louder now, the Baxter asks me if I am with him.
I’m so confused.
“Rodney!” the chek-tah woman screams at me.
I turn to her, grab her face, and search her eyes. There’s a wild flame that burns inside her. Her bones and muscles as taut as rope.
Baxter tells me to kill this chek-tah woman and tosses me his knife.
“Rodney, please!” She speaks to me in the foreign tongue.
I turn to Baxter. He makes a stabbing motion with his hand and laughs.
I look back at the chek-tah woman—
She makes a sudden move with her foot, hitting me below my stomach . . . between my legs—
A white light explodes in my brain as I keel over.
I gasp. Feels as though I’ve just come out of hibernation. The Kenneh’wah warriors around me look on with vapid expressions. Baxter observes me with the apathetic curiosity of a scientist watching the effects of his experiments on his subjects.
The experiment of merging the ancient dead with a modern soul.
Two personalities in one body.
This must be what Bear was going through. Fighting to keep himself, keep his psyche, intact from that primeval malevolence leaking its will and its desires into him—making its ambitions for acrimony and vengeance his own.
It just took a little pain—a solid kick to the nuts—to snap me out of it.
“Come on, Rodney,” Kylie pleads as I look down at her. There’s a weakness in her eyes. A pleading look that betrays her tough exterior. Her lips tremble, a glimmer of tears forming at the corners of her eyes. I bring the bone knife up to her face. “I know you’re in there.”
I wink at her.
She freezes.
“The game ends”—I turn to Baxter—“now!”
Baxter’s face morphs from surprise to anger. He shouts out commands to the other hunters. And since I’ve got Nannokto’s soul unexplainably intertwined with mine, I understand every Kenneh’wah word he says.
Baxter is telling the other hunters to take me down because I didn’t transition over completely. That my soul is tainted.
That I’m still chek-tah.
“Akha teya noka!” The words escape my lips from somewhere deep inside me as if I’ve known this language all along.
But I know I haven’t.
It’s Nannokto, and I feel a gnawing in my head, like an impending migraine. It’s as if his spirit is trying to push his way back into my psyche.
If I lose my sanity to Nannokto, there’s a chance I may not come back. And Kylie will most likely die by my own hands. I must make this quick.
“Akha teya noka!” I repeat to the others that I’m challenging Baxter.
The hunters respond by telling Baxter he must accept the challenge or be killed himself—rules he already knows.<
br />
Baxter shoots them a dirty look. To me, “So this is the thanks I get for sparing you from your pathetic former life?” Baxter grabs a tomahawk from one of the hunters.
“Yeah, and in return, I’m going to spare you from yours.”
Baxter takes a deep breath, snarls. “You won’t return a second time.”
“Guess we’ll see.”
Baxter raises his tomahawk in the air, and we charge each other.
Chapter 33—Mato Animales
Like two semis colliding at eighty miles an hour, Baxter and I slam into each other. He’s no longer stronger than I am since I’m now powered by the paranormal vigor of the Kenneh’wah.
I raise the knife and bring it down on him—but Baxter stops me short, locking both arms under me. His eyes pulse like red warning lights as he lands a kick to my chest. I’m knocked backward. He follows with a swing of his tomahawk. I duck, just barely missing the broad arc of the weapon. I step in, and with one quick jab, I stab him just below his rib cage. He growls as he whirls around, and the cold stone of his tomahawk clips my chin.
My hands break my fall. I roll away just as Baxter smacks his tomahawk against the ground where it lands with a thud. I drive my heel into his kneecap, hitting it sideways. He roars, buckles, and shifts his weight to one side like a bridge that’s lost one of its supports. He grabs his knee. A wildfire blazing in his eyes as he says, “Nannokto, nela kalah!”
Which means . . .
Nannokto . . .
Come out . . .
There’s a flash of white light. I grab my head, hands clutching either side as if preventing it from exploding.
I rub my eyes.
Rise to my feet.
Baxter has one knee on the ground, the other he clutches with his hand. His eyes are the color of blood moons. In a voice that’s as firm as the land we walk on, he tells me to sacrifice myself because I have gone mad. “Joka!” he barks at me like a wild dog. “Joka! Joka! Joka!” Now! Now! Now!
He pulls the knife from out his side and then tosses it at my feet.
“Joka!” Now!
I glare at the weapon as if it is a dead bird.
“Joka, Nannokto!”
I look to the others and ask them, “Have I gone crazy? Is there a chek-tah spirit poisoning my soul? Clouding my being?” But before they respond, Baxter leaps up and swings his tomahawk. Hits me—
White light.
An explosion of burning pain.
I drop to my knees.
Eyes fluttering, I awaken to find Baxter staring down at me.
Where the hell did I just go? What is going on? I feel as if I’ve been slipping in and out of a coma.
“I don’t need an unstable guy like you around if you’re not going to be a part of something bigger than yourself,” Baxter says. “However, that’s always been your problem, right?”
The side of my face feels wet. I touch it to find it’s covered in blood. The blood is gooier than I would’ve expected.
But then again, I died.
Right?
“As the shaman once told me,” Baxter goes on, “Nannokto had a lot of unresolved anger. He was quite the warrior in his day.” He wobbles as he walks, knees clicking with each step. “Pity he was reincarnated into your lousy body.” He turns toward the hunters, asks for a spear so that he can finish me, and one is thrown in his direction.
I try to get to my feet, but Baxter just kicks me back down. He raises the spear up above me.
“Maybe this will bring Nannokto out of you,” he says.
“Not if you kill me again.”
With a shit-eating grin, Baxter winks at me. He takes a step back and launches the spear over my head.
I hear a wet thump.
Quickly followed by a piercing scream.
I push myself off the ground and turn to find Kylie with the spear protruding from her chest. She dangles in the hunters’ arms, struggling to free herself. Blood spills from her lips and flowers out from out her wound as she locks eyes with me . . .
Then her head slumps forward.
“KYLIE!” Hate and hysteria overwhelm me.
Baxter nonchalantly dusts his hands off. “Who said I was going to kill you?”
There’s a flash of light in my mind again. I wince and when I open my eyes . . .
Kylie . . . is . . . moving . . .
Several more flashes of light blind me temporarily, and when they stop, I find I’m no longer staring at Kylie, but another woman—the exotic woman . . .
Keyaha.
Her face flickers momentarily. A single frame on a film reel. Just one twenty-fourth of a second, and then Kylie’s face reappears.
And then it repeats.
Keyaha.
Kylie.
Keyaha.
Kylie.
Keyaha.
She looks at me with eyes as infinite and bottomless as black holes ready to swallow me into them forever.
“Nannokto,” Keyaha says, “come back to me.”
“No—”
A flash of light.
Followed by a stabbing sensation . . .
I blink several times, and a beautiful woman comes into focus. It’s—
“Keyaha!”
She smiles at me. Her face half covered in blood. They’ve speared her like some wild boar. Why have they done this to her?
Okoto retrieves the spear and then tosses her body aside.
I jump to my feet, a hundred pains cry out from my body—a chorus of misery—but all that is nothing compared to what is tearing apart my heart. With the swiftness of a coyote, I pounce on Okoto—my old friend.
My brother!
And now he dares aim his spear at me?
“Nyek koh la!” I didn’t do this, he says. And then he tells me to look at Keyaha once more.
She lies on her side, and as I roll her over I find that she is not Keyaha—but that chek-tah woman!
What is this?
Is this shaman trickery?
Why did I just see my Keyaha, but now she has the face of the chek-tah?
I ask Okoto if I did this. Did I kill this woman?
He says no.
Then I ask him who did, and he points the spear at Baxter.
Our new chieftain.
“Nannokto?” Baxter then asks if I have returned.
“Returned from where?” I ask him.
Baxter chuckles, tells me not to worry about that and says he’s glad to have me back because he needs me.
I gaze at the dead chek-tah woman at my feet.
Why do I feel as though I have been in and out of a dream?
Baxter tells me that she is nothing more than a chek-tah. Not even worthy of a pig’s burial. He then asks me to call off the challenge so we can move on.
Challenge?
I tell him I did not issue a challenge, but he insists that I call if off anyway, that I completely surrender to him as chieftain. Surrender and he will command the other Kenneh’wah to spare me. He will tell them that the chek-tah spirit—the one who wrongfully issued the challenge—has been purged from my being.
His words feel wrong.
Everything feels wrong.
This light-skinned man—Baxter—is foul. The air around him reeks of deceit.
I look to my brothers. Having never called off a challenge, I’m not sure what comes next. Okoto reminds us all that a challenge may never be issued twice. If I call it off, I may not challenge the same man a second time.
“Nannokto!” Baxter shouts my name and urges me to withdraw.
I feel I have been woken up in the wrong time. To witness the death of my beautiful Keyaha once more, whether through trickery or through my own insanity.
I am confused. Why have I been awakened?
Okoto presses me to call off the challenge . . .
Or finish the fight.
I kneel next to the chek-tah woman. Her face is so familiar.
“Answer me!” Baxter speaks in words similarly foreign, like those of the l
ight-skinned strangers who took my Keyaha from me.
Perhaps he is one of the foreigners who slaughtered us. He has traveled through time to kill my beloved once again before my eyes, proclaimed himself leader, and manipulated the souls of my people. And yet he dares ask that I would be a part of his wickedness?
“This punk kid here actually had a good idea.” Baxter seems consumed with the sound of his own voice, savoring his own madness as he speaks to himself, for I know my brothers do not understand him. “We could spread like cancer. A never-ending, recycling horde of hate.” He licks his lips, eyes pulsing.
My brothers may be afraid or honoring the tradition of respecting the holder of the gem’kah, but I am no fool. This light-skinned man is the real chek-tah. He is not Kenneh’wah, even if he is holding the teeth of our forefathers as if they are his. Nor does he deserve the honor of leading our tribe.
Baxter takes a step forward. “Ha no lok takano?” What is my decision?
I decide that he is a wolf disguised as one of us.
I decide that he must die because he is chek-tah.
I yank the spear from Okoto’s grip and recall the words spoken to me many moons ago. “Yo mato animales.”
“Perro feo!” Baxter responds in his devil tongue.
I raise the spear. His eyes widen in surprise—before he can move, I launch it at him, catching him right in his stomach. He screams and keels over, clutching the end of the spear in his hand. I charge at him, ready to tear his flesh from his bones. Though as I make my way toward him, he chuckles and looks up at me with those demon eyes.
I am almost upon him, going to rip that grin from his lips—
There’s the sound of something snapping. Then a blur of movement. Baxter suddenly jumps up like a fox pouncing on his prey.
That prey being me.
And the moment my hands touch his shoulders, his hands reach out, and with the strength of a black bear, he pulls me into him—into the jagged end of the spear protruding from his gut. The wooden shaft of the spear sinks into my stomach as he pins me tight against him. Shock takes over. I feel this foreign body I’m trapped in giving out.
I try to push away from Baxter, but he holds me tight. He moves one hand behind his back. I hear wood snap as he breaks off the end of the spear. “Tenias razon. Mato animales.” He laughs and then says, “Perdoname.”
The Death Wish Game Page 18